Apps for Dyslexic Students

Learning Ally

Learning Ally is a national non-profit dedicated to helping students with print disabilities, including blindness, visual impairment and dyslexia. Learning Ally improves the way students learn at home and in the classroom. It's mission is to promote personal achievement when access and reading are barriers to learning by advancing the use of accessible and effective educational solutions. Learning Ally provides kids access to 80,000 audio books and textbooks. These audiobooks can help any struggling reader. Free to Dyslexia students at McAllen ISD. Dyslexia teachers provide students with a login and password. This app can be used on any IOS or Android device and any on computer.

People who get their news from the Internet have been using Pocket for several years. Recent updates to the iOS and Android apps have made the curation tool a valuable piece of assistive technology. Students with dyslexia can collect articles in Pocket and use its new text-to-speech feature to hear the content read aloud.

Ginger

Sometimes, traditional spell-checkers do not catch every error in a piece of writing, such as when students use incorrect homonyms. Ginger Page is a word processing app with a contextual spelling and grammar checker. It looks at entire sentences as units while searching for errors. It also has a unique rephrasing tool that suggests better word choices for a piece of writing.

Google Keyboard

The onscreen keyboard of a mobile device is essential in the transformation of thoughts to written words. For Android users with dyslexia, the Google Keyboard provides both dictation and word prediction for spelling assistance in any app.

Quizlet

Students familiar with the Web-based flashcard tool Quizlet will find its companion mobile app beneficial. Flashcard decks created on the website can be downloaded to mobile devices, and students can create new multi-sensory decks directly in the app. All decks utilize integrated text-to-speech for independent study and auditory reinforcement.

Adobe Voice

Adobe Voice provides an elegant alternative to traditional slideshow presentations for students with dyslexia. While the app gives the option of including written text, each presentation is based on voice narration and images. Once a series of slides is created, the app transforms it into an animated video with background music.

Key Features: a means of presenting information verbally, ability to save completed videos to the photos app for easy sharing

MindMeister App

A second option for creating electronic graphic organizers for both iOS and Android devices is the Mindmeister app. It has multiple visual options for creating customized diagrams, which can be exported as PDF, PNG, and RTF files, as well as converted to Word and PowerPoint documents.

Ideament lets you easily draw a diagram (mind map, concept map, or flow chart), convert it to a text outline, and vice versa. It can be used to brainstorm new ideas, illustrate concepts, make lists and outlines, plan presentations, create organizational charts, and more.

This app allows students to take a photo of math problem to get instant and step-by-step solutions. It is not designed for math past high school, but is a simple, easy-to-use program. After taking a picture of your problem, Photomath provides both the solution and a detailed list of steps to help students figure out how the answer was derived.

Please note: McAllen ISD student, teacher, alumni and staff photos are on-going and will be updated at least twice a year to showcase multiple campuses and the McAllen community at large. The McAllen Independent School District is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate against any applicant on the basis of race, color, religion, gender, national origin, age or disability.

McAllen ISD adopted a Maintenance and Operations tax rate that will raise more taxes for Maintenance and Operations than last year's tax rate. The tax rate will effectively be raised by zero percent and will raise taxes for Maintenance and Operations on a $100,000 home by approximately zero dollars.

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